ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores two accounts of children’s attempts to answer what Sigmund Freud regards as the original—the abiding—question: “the great riddle of where babies come from,” which he calls “the first problem to engage a child’s mental powers”. Freud’s Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy accidentally gives rise to the speculation that the origin of little Hans’s horse phobia may lie in a verbal resemblance or propinquity in “nonsense” as much as in the castration anxiety of an oedipal scenario. Linguistic accident generates the traffic in meaning with which Freud’s “little enquirer” precociously collides. The only language without ambiguity, or without the risk of misnaming, would be the language of things, which is no language at all; or else the “language” of psychosis. Freud’s own telling installs little Hans in a retroactive narrative whereby meaning always comes afterwards while seeming to have come before.
